[CHAPTER III.]
The winter ploughing had commenced, and Jean, that cold grey February afternoon, had just arrived with his plough at his big patch of ground on the plain, where he still had a good couple of hours' work before him. It was a strip at the edge of the field that he was going to plough, intending to sow it with a new variety of Scotch wheat, a course which had been recommended by his old master, Hourdequin, who had moreover promised him several bushels of seed-corn.
Jean at once set to work, beginning at the spot where he had left off on the previous day; and, putting his plough into position and grasping hold of the arms, he started his horse, shouting in a gruff voice:
"Gee woh! Gee woh!"
Violent rains, coming after excessive heat, had so stiffened the clayey soil that it was with great difficulty that the plough-share and coulter broke off the strips of earth through which they cut. The heavy clods could be heard grating against the mould-board as the latter turned them over, burying the manure with which the field was covered. Every now and then a stone or some other obstacle gave the plough a sudden shock.
"Gee woh! Gee woh!" cried Jean, as grasping the handles with his outstretched arms he guided the plough so correctly that the furrows were as straight as if they had been traced out by rule and line. Meanwhile his horse, keeping its head down and burying its hoofs in the soil, drew the plough forward with a steady regular motion. Whenever the implement got clogged, Jean jerked off the earth and weeds, and then it glided on again, leaving the rich soil behind it upraised, quivering and trembling, as though alive, and with its very entrails exposed.
He reached the end of the furrow, and then turned round and commenced a new one. Presently he became affected by a sort of intoxication due to the strong odour exhaled by the disturbed soil, an odour suggestive of damp recesses where the seed would germinate. His slow monotonous gait and his fixed gaze completed his feeling of dazed abstraction. He would never succeed in becoming a genuine peasant, he thought. He was not a native of the soil, and he still retained the feelings of a town-bred workman, of a trooper who had served through the campaign in Italy; and things that the peasants could not see or feel were very visible and apparent to him—the great mournful peacefulness of the plain and the deep breathing of the soil beneath the sunshine and the showers. He had always had visions of retiring into the peace of the country, but how foolish he must have been to imagine that it was only necessary to lay down the gun and the plane and to grasp hold of the plough to satisfy his taste for tranquillity! Though the soil might be peaceful and kindly to those that loved it, the villages that clung to it like nests of vermin, full of human insects that preyed upon its flesh, sufficed to dishonour and pollute it. He could remember no sufferings in his previous life equal to those which he had endured since his arrival at La Borderie, now a long time ago.
Being obliged to raise the arms a little in order to ease the plough, a slight unevenness in the furrow annoyed him, and he began to display still greater care in guiding his horse.